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Establishing my food-critic cred: my slapped-together ten-minute lunch includes a tuna melt (tuna mixed with labneh and scallions, grilled between local-ish American cheese on English muffin bread), red potato salad (also in a dressing of labneh, olive oil, lemon, and scallion), green beans with butter-toasted almonds, and a dish of fresh pineapple spears. These are the joys of preparedness, chickadees.

Establishing my blogger cred: I changed back into pajamas to eat it.

Establishing my willingness to experiment within highly gendered expectations: am wearing new shoes with said pajamas and watching the “Sex and the City” pilot for the first time. For the latter, I credit Emily Nussbaum. For the former, I have no excuse.

Dear Dad, I was thinking about “Macbeth” again this week, and the cat i’ the adage. Whenever I read that, I think of talking to you.

Dear Dad, I got some new cartridges for those pens you gave me when I first went back to school. Thanks for thinking of me, and for knowing how useful it is to have brightly colored pens so classmates don’t walk off with them.

Dear Dad, it might be about time for me to have a BLT. I never have one without thinking of that midnight with you. I wish I could take you to the neighborhood restaurant where I sometimes get them. You’d hate the noise and love the fries, and you would have been as vexed as I was that they called themselves Hot Suppa but weren’t open for supper, and as weirdly relieved as I was when they fiiiiinally started serving during supper hours.

Dear Dad, I’ve been in pain for a few weeks now — nothing serious, but unpleasant and even scary sometimes. The Fella has been unsurprisingly amazing and thoughtful during all that time. I wish you’d met him. You’d love and trust him with all your heart, just like I do. I think you’d love him for himself, not just because he loves and cares for your daughter so sweetly and unfailingly.

Dear Dad, I’ve spent a lot of years unwinding my complicated feelings about my childhood and the ways my parents coped with (or didn’t cope with) your own grief and heartache before I was born, and how that affected my own adult relationships and my own childless state, and I know that I might never come to the end of that skein.

But it gets easier and easier to reconcile that complex snarl of feelings with the simple love that I feel for you and Mom, and to say it over and over: Dear Dad, I love you. Dear Dad, I miss you.

updated to add: I stopped typing, hit post, and went back to the second half of my sandwich, only to find a bit of avocado on the sofa next to the plate. And no, that was not the missing piece from the list.

The Sandwich Party is underway! Friday night, The Fella and I kicked off the weekend with grilled cheddar cheese sandwiches stuffed with garlicky spinach, served with cream of tomato soup.

The sandwich looks a mite sloppy, but I assure you it was just sloppy enough: the gooey cheese held the glistening, gorgeous spinach inside the crispy bread, and the whole thing made a perfect foil for the mild, creamy soup.

The version you see before you is a little duded up, with those sprigs of cilantro. Occasionally it might instead be topped with a very few slivers of thinly sliced red onion, or slices of tomato. But the basic scheme is:

a family favorite: The Beltch. My mother, the polite lady that she is, chooses to put the vowel after the L, making it a Bletch (as if that’s a polite sound!). As you might have guessed, it’s a variation on the famous BLT (bacon, lettuce, and tomato), but adding cheese (CH). For proper BELTCH construction, a fried egg should be added to achieve full letter representation, but circumstances did not allow for an egg in this production.

Carlarey has the breakfast of champions!

So here it is, nothing fancy. Just a plain old working class turkey, salami, pastrami sandwich with shredded habanero cheese and jalapenos. It was what my kid wanted for breakfast yesterday morning, and it sounded so good I made one for myself.

I discovered one day that if I took some of the sourdough bread that we had, slathered it with butter and garlic powder, and fried it, it made a delicious garlic bread, which is the perfect place to put a bunch of warmed spaghetti sauce. It’s a lot like a sloppy Joe, actually, though I like the flavors of spaghetti sauce better. My mom thought this was a disgusting idea, until she finally gave it a try, and became an instant convert. She always said that sane people are willing to change their mind when they are given the proper evidence, which this sandwich clearly is.

Sounds tempting, doesn’t it? Join the fifth Sandwich Party — you still have time! Around these parts, we had a few hours without power and a looooooong stretch with no wifi, so I’m giving myself (and you!) a little extra leeway to get those last posts and links in. I can’t wait to see what sandwich you make!

With Sandwich Party #5 coming up this weekend, The Fella and I were brainstorming a list of sandwich-centric scenes in movies and TV. I’ve been thinking about the diner scene from Five Easy Pieces. You know the one I mean: the scene in which Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) wrangles with a waitress over a side order of wheat toast.

The scene is famous — or infamous — for good reasons, and complex ones at that. At its simplest level, the diner scene editorializes on the changing times: the iconoclast tries to indulge his modest tastes, only to be blocked by the traditionalist, an unyielding stickler mired in arbitrary rules. This scene helped to establish Jack Nicholson as a counter-culture hero, and why not? He’s just a good-looking rebel who plays by his own rules.

But there’s another level to this exchange, and I’d argue that it’s far more important than the inter-generational culture clash. Ultimately, the diner scene is about the confusion that comes with freedom, about the difficulty of discerning one’s own genuine desires.

Watch the scene carefully. Bobby seems to know exactly what he wants, and he seems to know how to get it, even from their ornery waitress. He keeps his voice calm and civil, he’s well in control of his temper, and he’s negotiated her to a point of decision: she’s about to choose whether to take his precisely phrased order or to deny it.

She’s peeved as she asks, “You want me to hold the chicken, huh?” But she hasn’t refused. Not yet. She’s noted down his many other requests: no potatoes, no mayo, no butter, no lettuce. She might, just might, jot down “no chicken” and curtly walk away to place the order. She’s balanced at the moment of decision.

Then he utters, still in his calm, civil voice, “I want you to hold it between your knees.”

Of course the waitress kicks them out. Of course Bobby explodes in a fit of anger. Because that is what he wanted all the time. He wanted a fight, and he carefully constructed one. No substitutions.

Because this is the center of Bobby’s character: he cannot be satisfied with what he has, and he will not be satisfied with anything he could receive. He doesn’t want what he has, he doesn’t want what you might offer freely, and he doesn’t want what he pursues.